Forearm tattoo of grey seed heads on thin stems above a shaded geometric circle, with orange and red vertical streaks below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seed heads and geometric circle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm is shown with a tattoo of tall wildflower stems topped with seed heads in black and grey linework. Below them sits a shaded geometric circle with a dotted, faceted pattern, and vertical orange, red and yellow streaks run down the arm beside it. The composition runs from the elbow towards the wrist against a plain background, with the person's torso and a wooden floor partly visible.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Forearm Seed head Wildflower Stem Mandala

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, and mind the stool, it has one leg shorter than the other, like most of us. I'll tell you about Mairead Tulloch, who kept the light on Skerry Holm for eleven winters with nobody to talk to but the gulls and the brass. She never asked the Board for a second man, and when they sent one she put him on the first boat back.

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Every spring she walked the sea wall gathering seed heads. Thrift, sea campion, the tall grey stalks that rooted in cracks where nothing else would take. She dried them on string across the lamp room and said the brass liked the company. In the evenings she polished the great lens, a ring of cut glass with a star at its heart, until the setting sun came through it and laid orange bars down the stone stair like rungs of a ladder somebody had dropped.

The autumn the fog came down and stayed, the clockwork seized. She spent three nights turning the lens by hand with a crowbar and her own shoulder, and the light went out over the water in long streaks that the mainland boat could follow home. On the fourth morning the relief boat came alongside, and the skipper climbed up grey-faced and asked how she'd kept it burning.

She showed him the strings of seed heads, bone dry, and said, 'Something has to come back up through the rock, and it may as well be the flowers.' He didn't understand her. I think you do, sat there with your tea going cold.